Conferences

Models like that by Tourangeau, Rips and Rasinski (2000) and others suggest that people do not have a readily available response in their memory but that they “sample” believes from memory on the basis of which they create a judgment which is next expressed in a response.

Many of these models assume that a response to a survey question is created in about four steps:

1. Comprehension of the question

2. Retrieval of information

3. Deriving a judgement

4. Formulating a response

Others emphasize the unconscious aspects of these processes (e.g. Lodge & McGraw 1995) or focus on the interactivity of the first and last stage (e.g. van der Zouwen 2002, Dijkstra 1999).

For this session we would like to invite researchers who are working on modelling and validations of such cognitive approaches, or on the application of cognitive theories on survey phenomena. Suitable topics are, for example:

- the measurement of cognitive processes underlying survey answers, e.g. with reaction times, eye-tracking, (correlational) experiments, interactional data, and other methods from cognitive science

- the application of existing cognitive models of question answering processes

- modelling of these processes, i.e. mathematical or connectionist